Honey, I'm home

Sometimes I don't know how I got so lucky to have met the love of my life. Looking beyond the fact that every single gawd damn star had to be aligned for us to meet in the first place is the blessing that not only do I dig this guy like a giant spoonful of fudge right out of the jar but I can actually live with him. Something I've been unable to do with any other living person ever.

I'd like to blame my inability to cohabitate on everyone else, because people are crazy and impossible to live with, but I'm sure my occasional rigidity and slight OCD probably wasn't the ideal situation for my former roommates but lets face it, I'm a bright light in the crushing despair of sharing your private space with another so clearly I was less to blame. Clearly.

I traipsed off to college a little later than most. I was a few weeks shy of my 21st birthday and had made the decision to follow my then boyfriend to the school he'd transferred to the previous Spring. My only experience living with people were with my parents, my brother who moved out when I was 9 and a brief and extremely painful period of time when my divorcing Aunt and her 2 very young children lived with us before she got her own place.

I decided to live in the dorms and was happy to get placed into the same one my bf was living in but of course we weren't in the same room or even the same floor. I was randomly paired with a girl about year younger than me and a complete stranger. I remember filling out some kind of "this is the type of person I won't hate" card to get hooked up with someone remotely compatible. I think someone took that card and used it to roll a joint then smoked any hope of me rooming with an actual human to the roach.

A few days before school started we moved in. I walked through my door and there she was. Her shit spread all over the room, her ample frame lounging on my bed, the phone glued to her ear as she gave me a barely perceptible nod. I knew instantly this was going to be a nightmare and I wasn't wrong.

She routinely ate all of my food, leaving my cans of precious Pringles stealthily on my shelf where I'd find only a few sad crumbs at the bottom. She also ate my saved piece of birthday cake waiting patiently in the fridge for my sweet lips. Birthday cake!! And I never had a chance to confront her since she disappeared during the day like a vampire and came home while I was asleep.

A daily call to her mother that lasted for hours tying up our phone and every single fucking morning she'd set her alarm for 2 hours before she had to get up and 4 hours before I had to leave for class then sleep through the snooze for 5 minutes at a time until I grabbed something huge to throw against our dusty metal blinds making a racket big enough to wake the dead so she'd roll her fat ass over and turn the fucking alarm off. This happened every day.

Then there was the snoring. Snoring so boisterous and powerful she could suck up a shoe through her thundering nostrils. You could hear the cacophony from her sinus cavity at least 2 doors down and people routinely sent looks of condolence my way. One night it was so bad and the tension so tight between us I had to sleep on someones foam couch that unfolded to a small and desperately firm lump of a mattress.

A quarter and a half in and I was beyond done. I believe my exact words to the dorm association person were, "unless you want to find a dead sophomore in room 201 with a potato chip sticking out of her eye socket you'll move me to an available single before the week is done." Which they did.

The next year at school I had a terrible time as well. When I drove the 100 miles to school, showing up to collect my dorm packet without checking first to make sure everything was kosher, I was told I had no room as I'd failed to fill out another damn form somewhere along the way. Completely panicked I started calling friends from the payphone until I found space off campus with 3 girls who were going to share a 2 bedroom condo.

Thanking my lucky stars I accepted their invitation as they agreed to my sobbing pleas and the deal was made. Little did I know I was entering a den of insanity. One girl stole my clothes and absolutely refused to admit she'd done it when I'd have the evidence in my hot little hands. Another girl made a CHART WHEEL with a myriad of chores for all of us to do on any given week. Right, like I'm washing the crusty remnants of your fucking burrito adhered to cheap plastic plates.

The girl I shared a room with wasn't too bad but she had the longest list of weird idiosyncrasies ever. We actually ended up moving out of the condo after 11 weeks, each of us unable to cope with the dopes for an entire school year. But as our tenure as roomies went on the more I couldn't stand her. At least we weren't in the same room any more but she drove me fucking nuts.

She was a creature of intense habit attempting to make her world as small as possible. She refused to listen to anything resembling news, world events, entertainment gossip, local happenings or traffic reports. She didn't want to be exposed to anything. And she was going to become a teacher! She could only drive her car if she took just her left shoe off, not the right, only the left. And she only wore those cheap, flimsy Keds from K-mart with cotton stirrup pants and a t-shirt. Every day.

The only food she would eat was frozen burritos but she'd unwrap them and scoop the guts out then roll up the tortilla like a cigar and eat that last, spaghettios that would be heated then poured into a tortilla-lined bowl, apples with half of a jar of peanut butter, and an entire pint of peanut-butter chocolate Hagen Daaz consumed weekly. (That last one I actually envied.)

Since her diet consisted of super-rich and fatty food her alone-time in the bathroom would send a stench through our apartment that could knock a buzzard off a rotting corpse. Every morning she'd wash her long hair with Flex shampoo, another sickening and distinct smell, and I'd be awoken at the crack of 7:30 by a loud SMACK as she flipped her wet hair against the tub to I guess beat the water out of it but she only managed to get the entire bathroom soaked. She was a nice enough girl but as you can plainly see, a lunatic.

After I graduated and moved back home I once again lived with my parents, which is hard enough, then with my boyfriend, back with my parents, then got married. Somewhere along the way my Aunt, the same one mentioned above, moved in with my parents who then moved to another state and left me, my new husband and my Aunt living under a single roof. Needless to say, that didn't go well and is a long story for another time.

Fast forward through my divorce and finally living on my own for 7 1/2 years. Until June of 2005 when whitey hauled his juicy ass to San Diego from Northern Cal and we took the shacking up plunge. We didn't intend on living together since neither of us knew how it would work out, and I'll admit the first few months took a lot of butt-sniffing to get used to it and each other, but now more than 2 years later I can't imagine coming home to a house that didn't have my baby in it.

We do really well in our tight space and limbo-existence with most of our belongings boxed up and packed in the garage while we patiently wait for our desired future in the Pacific Northwest to begin. We laugh all the time, do our own things, hold hands watching T.V., have dinner together and sometimes alone, respect each other's space, needs, and wants, respect each other, cooperate, compromise and try to have the most fucking fun we can.

It's not perfect, sometimes I accuse him of being raised in a barn when he sprays caustic veneer-eating cleaner on my $500 coffee table, or try to ignore his bizarre humming that I know he doesn't even realize he's doing. But he also makes me laugh on a regular basis like the other night when he tuned in to a Clint Eastwood flick then gruffed when he realized it wasn't a man movie but rather "The Bridges of Fuck You." I'm still giggling over that one.

I really never thought I'd ever, ever, ever find someone who could put up with my shit and I the same but I did. And I'm so fucking lucky.